Well...I did say it would be a tough decision to make to cut someone such a short-term in to their tenure with the club. I certainly didn't put it up here thinking everyone would agree with me - I put it up to spark debate, to put out another option rather than being resigned to a few years of what we have been dished up thus far. I got the debate, however you backed me in to a corner - I'm biased against him if I bag him, I'm a hypocrite if I don't.
This is the way I see his time as head coach thus far. He has had some battles so far - losing Wicks wasn't such a big loss, however losing Houston is a big loss. In saying that Pato has been filling Houston's role more than adequately so far and Tuimavave has been doing a better job than Wicks would have any way. He is operating with a squad well below the salary cap, and he is operating with a NYC team which gives him virtually no options of filling those two vacant gaps.
However...he inherited a semi-final team last year with a pretty good attitude. He seemed to have a pretty good off-season with the players, not too many rep players who spent an extended amount of time away from the team, a few injuries but not too many. The team has gone backwards on his watch. Attitudes have changed, fitness is noticeably down, key players like Mullen and De Gois are inconsistent at best, poor at worst.
We are on 6 points, however have looked far from convincing. A good win over the dogs however it seems a long time ago. Cowboys and Broncos wins were far from convincing. Sharks performance was a disgrace. We had an instinct last year where we had a desire to win and take the big scalps. That seems to have disappeared. Every game so far we have had at least a 20 minute gap where we have let teams back in the game and more often than not let the game get away from us.
If he is frustrated with the conditioning of the team why isn't he insisting that something is done about it? When all the blame ends up on him why isn't he insisting that it improves rather than showing frustration on TV? If we are operating with 23 out of 25 players in the salary cap why aren't we making better progress in getting 2 players to fill the gap? We have 7 weeks until the 30 June deadline, however we are better off getting a mid-season transfer now rather than in 7 weeks.
We can blame the conditioning staff for the players fitness, we can blame the recruitment staff for the (lack of) recruitment, we can blame the junior staff for the progress of the younger players. We can blame Smith for everything we want to. However he is the one with the ultimate responsibility of how the NRL squad is going and ultimately it is up to him to kick up a fuss and get things changed that he is not happy with. I sense resignation that he can't control that rather than someone willing to kick up a fuss.
I almost see some Hagan in him. I have no problems with him being critical of players in the media because to be quite frank some of them deserved to be called out for the poor players they have been this year. Let's face it - some of them are only in there right now because there are simply no other alternatives at the moment (again...not really Stone's fault). We have seen no real criticism in the media of individual performances thus far (have we?).
To an extent cutting him now wouldn't be fair on him. He inherited this squad, he has had no time to recruit and put his own twist on the squad. He has been sold a bit of a sh*t sandwich thus far and he does deserve some more time.
However the question I was asking is if someone comes along that ultimately can do a better job, can improve the team as a whole, can aid in recruitment and can get us closer to winning a premiership...do we disregard them because we want to be fair to the existing coach? Do we want to be the nice guys who are happy with mediocrity or the ruthless guys who are willing to make the hard decisions in order to succeed?
Do we want to be plodders, or do we want to win?
